Using Project Perspectives in Jet Enterprise

Overview

The purpose of Project Perspectives is to make it easier to work with large projects. Working in one big project can make it hard to maintain a good overview and find an individual object quickly.

The idea is that a user can create different perspectives on a project. A perspective is a subset of the objects within the project that relates to a specific area or task. For example, the user could create a “Finance” perspective that contains all of the tables, dimensions and cubes that are related to finance. When this perspective is active, every in the project not related to this perspective will be hidden in the project tree. Also, objects can be in multiple perspective when relevant. Dynamic perspecitves allow the user to add an object to the perspectives and have all related objects be automatically added as well. This makes it easy to create a perspective based off of a cube which will automatically include all objects necessary to process the cube.

The JDM takes table relations into consideration when calculating what tables will be included in a dynamic perspective. Any tables that are related to a table in the perspective with a relationship type that is either “error” or “error with physical relation” will be included. Relations of the types “warning” or “relation only” are not included, since these relation types imply a weak connection between the tables.

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Process

Adding a New Perspective

To add a project perspective, dynamic or static, follow the steps below.

1. If no perspectives currently exist, right-click the project name and navigate to Advanced -> Project perspectives. If perspectives already exist, right-click on Project Perspectives and click on Add/Edit Project Perspectives. The Project Perspectives window open.

2. Click on Add Perspective. A new column is added to the grid with the name “Per-spective” in the Perspective Name row. Double-click on the name to edit it and click outside the field once it has been named appropriately. Select Dynamic Perspective if you wish to make the new project perspective dynamic. This setting can be changed at any time.

3. Each OLAP server, data warehouse and business unit is listed in the first column of the grid. Click on the + besides the OLAP server, data warehouse or business unit to show the object’s child elements. Select the cubes, dimensions and tables you wish to include in your project perspective. If you add an object to a dynamic perspective, dependent objects will be added automatically. You can recognize dynamically added objects by the checkbox with an indeterminate state. The example below shows a dynamic perspective created for the Finance module which was created by checking both the Dynamic Perspective box along with the box for the Finance cube. All other related objects are automatically selected.

4. Click on OK. The new project perspective now appears under Project Perspectives in the project tree.

Activating a Perspective

Only one perspective may be active at a time. There are three ways of activating a perspective.

A. In the project tree, navigate to Project Perspectives , right click on the name of the perspective to activate and click Use Project Perspective .

B. In the ribbon, navigate to Tools . In the Project Perspectives group, click on the Project Perspectives list and then click on the perspective you wish to activate.

C. In the Quick Access Toolbar, click on the Project Perspectives list and then click on the perspective to activate.

Note: The Project Perspectives list is not shown in the Quick Access Toolbar when there are no perspectives in the project.

Deactivating All Perspectives

To disable all perspectives and see all objects there are two options.

A. Click on the None perspective in the Project Perspectives list in the ribbon or the Quick Access Toolbar as described in "Activating a Perspective" above.

B. In the project tree, navigate to Project Perspectives , right click on the name of the currently active perspective and click Use Project Perspective . This will remove the Checkmark from Use Project Perspective and change the current perspective to “None”.

Note: When deploying a perspective there is a common issue when deploying OLAP Cubes. The last dimension might fail with the error message "No dimension relationships exist within the measure group". This is caused by the way the JDM deploys dimensions by removing and reapplying the dimensions.